Vehicle-to-x communication, also known as car-to-X communication, or C2X or V2X communication for short, is at the state of the art research or advanced development stage and is currently in the standardization phase. Here, in particular standard IEEE 802.11p can be used as a basis.
Since such communication is highly critical for road traffic, typically security against manipulation is necessary. For this, particularly, a method can be used in which the communication can be made verifiable using cryptographic checksums. These checksums are typically based on asymmetric cryptographic methods, by way of example ECDSA. As the basis for such verification, all authorized vehicles are registered with the public keys used by them via a central infrastructure, which can also be referred to as a Public Key Infrastructure (PKI).
It has been shown that the verification of all messages incoming to, or received by, a vehicle, requires a great deal of computing power, making suitable solutions more expensive. Rather than this verify-all approach, therefore, the verification-on-demand approach has now been developed, in which messages are only checked where they are considered important for applications or classified as important by another algorithm. A verification-on-demand approach thus saves a considerable amount of computing power compared to a verify-all approach.
Typically attempts are made to structurally combine those elements that are absolutely essential for vehicle-to-x communication or where the vehicle-to-x communication differs from existing solutions in the vehicle. This mainly involves a transceiver and a security support. The applications, however, can to some extent be accommodated by existing control units.
Such a distributed design, however, presents difficulties for the verification-on-demand approach, since the decision on whether a message is important or not is taken in a control unit where there is a lack of security solutions or security, since these are accommodated in the device specific to the vehicle-to-x communication.